Lucas: Privileged few enter our White House

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, left, and Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohammed Kamel Amr leave after a news conference at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Cairo, Egypt on Saturday, March 2, 2013. Cairo is the sixth leg of Kerry's first official overseas trip and begins the Middle East portion of his nine-day journey. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, Pool)

It is too bad Secretary of State John Kerry could not have skimmed some loose change from that $250 million in taxpayers’ money he handed over to the Muslim Brotherhood leaders of Egypt last week.

That way he could have perhaps come up with $1 million or so to give to President Obama so the cost-conscious leader of the free world could keep the White House open for tourists.

A petulant President Barack Obama, in a downright mean act — among his other nasty warnings — canceled all public tours of the White House as a result of the sequester budget cuts, cuts he once proposed and supported before he turned against them.

Nobody knows how long the White House shutdown by the country’s budget-cutter-in-chief, which went into effect Saturday, will last. But there is no doubt that thousands of schoolchildren are crushed to learn that their long arranged and anticipated visits to the White House have been canceled. Why punish the children?

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It says a lot about Obama, our mean-spirited leader.

It is estimated that the United States of America, the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world, with a $3.8 trillion annual budget, will save a measly $1 million by eliminating the tourist visits, which is just about what it cost taxpayers to pay for Obama’s recent Florida golf outing with Tiger Woods.

This led U.S. Rep. Louis Gohmert, a Republican from Texas, to file legislation barring funding of future Obama golf outings until the White House promises to reopen the White House tours. The bill, like Obama’s heavy golf schedule, is more of a joke than a threat, and not expected to go anywhere.

Perhaps Obama could charge schoolchildren a $10 fee to visit the White House in a sort of Chicago-style “pay-to-play” arrangement, the way he is shaking down fat-cat donors for $500,000 contributions to Organizing for Action, his advocacy group, promising rich contributors quarterly White House meetings with him.

Several of the news stories about the White House shutdown referred to the president’s residence as Obama’s home, which is not quite accurate. Obama’s home is in Chicago, where he comes from and where he will return.

The White House is his house, a place owned by the American people, where the president lives rent-free on a temporary basis. So Obama, in effect, is barring people — the American schoolchildren — from visiting a house that they own, while selling White House access to rich people. Not a very savvy public-relations move.